page_title: Alexander Graham Bell honors and tributes
section_title: Major awards and tributes
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander Graham Bell honors and tributes / Major awards and tributes
caption_attribution_description: English: An image of the master telephone patent awarded to Alexander Graham Bell. The patent was arguably the most valuable every awarded in history.
context_page_description: Alexander Graham Bell honors and tributes include honors bestowed upon him and awards named for him.
  Alexander Graham Bell received numerous tributes during his life, and new awards were subsequently named for him posthumously.
  Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 16, 1847.
context_section_description: Among those tributes:
  Chief George Henry Martin Johnson (Onwanonsyshon) of the aboriginal Six Nations Mohawk Reserve, near Bell's home in Brantford, Ontario, awarded him the title of Honorary Chief for his work in translating the unwritten Mohawk language into Visible Speech symbols (c. 1870);
  The National Association of Teachers of the Deaf elects Bell its president (1874);
  The United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Bell the master telephone patent, No. 174,465, dated March 7, 1876. It becomes the foundation asset of the Bell Telephone Company, which later evolved into AT&T, at times the world's largest telephone company. The patent is considered by many to be the most valuable ever issued in history (1876);
  The U.S. Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in June 1876,  made Bell's newly created telephone a featured headline worldwide just a few months after it had been patented.  Among the exhibition's judges were the notable Emperor Dom Pedro II of the Empire of Brazil and the eminent British physicist William Thomson (later made Lord Kelvin). Upon hearing Bell's voice through the telephone's receiver, the emperor reputedly exclaimed: "My God! It talks!" Thomson described the telephone as "the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph". Thomson and Emperor Pedro, who was equally amazed that the telephone could 'speak' in Portuguese, later recommended the device to the Committee of Electrical Awards, which voted Bell its Gold Medal for Electrical Equipment. Bell also won a second Gold Medal for his additional display of Visible Speech at the exposition, and further won an order of 100 telephones from Emperor Pedro for his country. Ironically, Bell—then occupied full-time as both a private teacher and as a professor at Boston University—hadn't planned on attending the exhibition due to his heavy work schedule, and left Boston only at the last moment to attend the exposition at the stern insistence of his then-fiance and future wife Mabel Hubbard, aged 18. Dom Pedro's chance viewing of the invention at the fair was pivotal to the awards and world headlines Bell earned, helping the telephone gain public acceptance (1876);
  The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Bell a Fellow of the Academy (1877);
  Bell received the James Watt silver medal for the telephone from the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society (1877);
  The Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association (a.k.a. the Association of the Mechanics of Boston) awarded two gold medals to Bell, as exhibitor #626 registered to the New England Telephone Company of Boston, MA, for both the telephone and Visible Speech, twinning the results of the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia two years earlier (1878);
  The Society of Arts in London awards him his first Royal Albert medal, a silver, for his paper on the telephone (1878);
  The Third Paris World's Fair, called the Exposition Universelle, awarded Bell (along with Elisha Gray and Thomas Edison) a Grand Prize for the telephone (1878);
  Gallaudet College, earlier chartered as the Columbia Institution Of The Deaf, and at the time called the National Deaf-Mute College, of Washington, D.C., awarded Bell an Honorary Ph.D. 'in recognition of his work for the Deaf' (1880).
  The French Academy, representing the French government, awarded Bell the Volta Prize with a purse of 50,000 francs (approximately $10,000) for the invention of the telephone (1880). Since Bell was becoming increasingly affluent, he used his prize money to create endowment funds (the 'Volta Fund') and institutions in and around the United States capital of Washington, D.C.. They included the prestigious 'Volta Laboratory Association' (1880), also known as the 'Volta Laboratory' and as the 'Alexander Graham Bell Laboratory', as well as creating the Volta Bureau (1887) as a center for studies on deafness. The Volta Laboratory became a permanently funded experimental facility devoted to scientific discovery, and the very next year invented a wax phonograph cylinder that was later used by Thomas Edison;
  The President of the Third 
caption: The master telephone patent, awarded to Bell in March 1876.
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